


Life or Something Like It

by brokenmemento



Category: Grace and Frankie (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-02
Updated: 2020-02-02
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:33:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22528654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brokenmemento/pseuds/brokenmemento
Summary: When it boils down to it, what she’s really been doing is writing a six year love letter to Frankie.
Relationships: Frankie Bergstein & Grace Hanson, Frankie Bergstein/Grace Hanson
Comments: 7
Kudos: 54





	Life or Something Like It

**Author's Note:**

> I think everyone knows those vows Grace said to Nick were for Frankie. Like, come on. Also, the title is stolen from that terrible Angelina Jolie movie but has absolutely nothing to do with it.

_~“Take a hike...I told [her] all the time to go away”~_

The beginning of their story is a rocky one. The beach house had loomed on the sand and rock horizon as Grace has stared at it from the road. She had been incredibly drunk, incredibly angry, and incredibly spiraling out of control inside of herself.

Frankie had been on top of the table in meditation and Grace had immediately felt chagrin. She’d just spent forty years with a man who had forgotten she existed, but there was nothing she wanted more than to be blissfully alone. 

The sage and the pot and the peyote had settled into the house and Grace just wanted it gone, like her marriage, because if there was no sound or smell or touch then maybe she wouldn’t exist either, which sounded really good. 

The beach house symbolized her new beginning, the her she could be without Robert always tiptoeing around. The one who didn’t have to worry about being the face of a company. The one whose life had been stagnant and who had been floating along for forty years. 

Those 365 days taught her something. It taught her that everything could be gone tomorrow. That when everything was gone, she didn’t want to be alone and that maybe, just maybe, Frankie could wind up being the type of person she could learn to like.

Promises weren’t made but days passed and Frankie did that thing Frankie is good at-stopping and making people notice. 

Grace learned that she was beyond resilient. And in resiliency, she searched different people for the thing Robert had lacked and the reason she had failed to take a breath in four decades. 

By the time it ended, her ex-husband had gained a husband and lost good functioning arteries, she and the girls had banded together over the loss of the role a male played in their life, and Frankie became a tolerable factor in getting older every day. No longer was she filling the air with hopes and wishes for Frankie’s absence, as if it had become ingrained in the fabric of living.

She danced on bar tops and drank whiskey flights and sat on curbs in rough neighborhoods because they had been thrown out of a club. It was her never-in-million-years. 

It’s not the way she would have ever imagined things going. Far from it. But somehow, she had wound up in an old place with an old face and the world open for her taking. 

The first year began with her drinking peyote, dancing by a fire on the beach, and having intermittent spells of puking up her guts. It ended watching Frankie eat a bag of cheez-its in the hospital lobby while Robert’s heart spazzed out and tried to give up on itself. 

It should have prepared her for the chaotic (but full) life she had ahead. Back then, it was hard to know how it would turn out. It was hard not to resent everything. 

_~“Every damn day I would find a new reason we couldn’t work”~_

Grace doesn’t like the her she was in the second year either. Back then, it had felt like a struggle against what was left behind in the wake of failed relationships and infuriating current ones.

Nothing was as it should be. The paint flecks in the sink spoke phantom tales of long washed brushes, the trail of crumbs on the floor of guts recently sated, and the music thumping from the studio of living a life completely annoying. 

Everywhere she turned, there was Frankie. She was in the kitchen with blenders, in the living room with blaring episodes of _Ray Donovan_ , even walking into Grace’s bathroom-ignoring all boundaries and decorum. 

Then came the yam man and a lot of wariness turned hate on his part. Frankie tried, really, to bridge the gap between the roommate Grace was and the boyfriend Jacob was becoming. How stupidly she had pushed her toward him, so desperate for Frankie to have a distraction from mucking up Grace’s life, love, and pursuit of happiness. 

The second year is still a dark one in Grace’s mind because she lost a friend, lost a shot at being normal, and almost lost the person who would teach her later on that being normal wasn’t what she really wanted anyway. 

Grace thinks that maybe that’s the darkest her life has ever been, that space of time where she was the other woman and Babe was dying and Frankie disliked even the idea of her because she couldn’t stay unsoaked in alcohol long enough to be a pleasant person. 

It was even worse than getting left by Robert for Sol, having to wake up every day knowing she was failing grandly at everything. 

Sitting on that couch in the dark with only the flickering television and thumping noise nearby to remind her of the choices she had made, she tried to think of a good reason why any of this was worth it. Even her own roommate didn’t want to be around her and the one person who had actually requested her presence she’d denied based on a set of morals she wasn’t sure she believed in anymore. 

None of it was working, and Grace had made excuse after excuse as to why. But on the sofa that night, she came to a stark realization that she was the common denominator in all of them. So she had risen from her stationary position, climbed the stairs toward her room, and opened her closet in resolution. 

She’d thrown on a black and white striped sweater, clasped a bit of jewelry on, curled the strands of her blonde but graying hair, and made her way to the other house down the beach’s way. 

She sat as Babe had died and tried not to feel her heart break inside her chest, had told herself that holding Frankie’s hand on the way home was just going through the motions and not being unconditional. 

When the gift was on the table, she had opened it and been surprised. She had spun out and here was Babe rearranging the world as she knew it. While her body might have been gone, her words clung and every time Grace looked at the drawer of her nightstand, it was as if Babe was whispering in her brain, _fuck yourself instead of your life._

So she had. 

That night, she fucked herself into oblivion because she’d told herself she couldn’t because she never really had. Embarrassment ebbed and orgasms flowed and of course Frankie would know about pleasure and pain and find a way to balance the two. 

Her mouth had worked faster than her mind when she agreed to start a vibrator business for geriatric women, with Frankie no less. But in that living room that day, she’d felt closer to Frankie than she ever had. 

The entire time they had lived together, she had approached their situation as a temporary instead of trying to do it right. This time, she used Frankie to help her work out the direction of her life. 

_~“But every time I pushed [her] away...”~_

Frankie is perhaps the best person to go to for guidance or aid when it comes to literally everything. As Vybrant was being started though, every idea and tangent felt like a fresh hell Grace would never stop living. 

It was so damn hard to get over the hurdle, to let Frankie see the bits and pieces of herself that she had kept on hard lockdown throughout the bulk of her life. She had to learn to talk, and give, and receive and those are all well and good until it turned into conversations about sex and intimacy and secrets she’d not told a soul. 

Physical pleasure wasn’t really tied to emotional pleasure and Grace knew that was the fundamental thing she had wanted to change with the experience of the Ménage. Through the talks though, she had always remained clinical, dolling out facts and statistics and testimonials from everyone except her own limited but vital background. 

That is until one day, Frankie pushed her too far, held her thumb down a little long, made Grace burst at the seams because she couldn’t keep it in any longer. For days and weeks, she’d denied and been vague, but after the thousandth inquiry, she had admitted to what she needed in a cracked and raw tone. 

She had laid waste to the truth with every sordid detail that Frankie had asked for and retreated to the sanctuary of her room, chest heaving and breath erratic. Grace had made a mistake. She’d let a chink appear in the wall and there was no way Frankie wouldn’t use it to her full advantage. 

No matter how hard she pushed, how at arm’s length she tried to keep Frankie, she found herself wanting more. After that tense night that she had lost it, Vybrant teetered to life and then it galloped. Then it ran. 

Soon she had an internet queue of thousands of vibrators, a table full of actual product, and stickers shooting out of a printer, thoroughly killing one ink cartridge after the next. It felt like the highest peace one could attain when most would feel like they were drowning under a tidal wave. 

The rote process was something she derived joy from. It gave her purpose and motivation. Each new order that pinged on the screen filled her heart to the brim. She had finally achieved launching a business to give a break to older women, had learned to let go a little where Frankie was concerned, and felt content in the middle of it all. 

But like most things, they never exist in order to last. The thing that ultimately gives something its beauty is the fact that it can so easily be taken away. Or disappear. 

The thing that once felt like second nature and skin could wake up one morning and be 1500 miles away. For all that shoving, once Frankie wasn’t in reach, the world seemed a little smaller. 

_~“[She] always came back for me”~_

New Mexico had been a test, of sorts. So was Jacob. Up until then, Grace was sure that people had not cared for her but nonetheless, they had endured her. They had kept their silence and found a voice in their disapproval of her through looks. Jacob was the first one to let her know outright. 

That third year, she was as close to herself as she’d ever been. There hadn't been a laundry list of men, of working so hard to gain appreciation from anyone other than Frankie. And Grace had found herself liking that life-the one where there was Vybrant during the day and Frankie in the evening and her vibrator at night.

Loneliness wasn’t an absolute and the edges of a life like that was smooth and soft, something Grace could imagine holding onto for a really long time. But happiness has never been a constant and in that third year, Grace felt like she had finally lost something of worth. 

The house gained a quiet that never quite sat with her. All around were signs of an existence lived well, but the thing that had made them that way was missing in the equation and suddenly a sad and substituted version was trying to fill the void. It’s why she turned to solutions to problems she hadn’t created and tried to find solace in them even though they felt awkward and semi-forced. 

What was only marked as several months on a calendar felt like several lifetimes as she lived them. No amount of text messaging or FaceTime could eliminate the fact that Frankie had chosen to figure out her relationship, had prioritized someone else in what Grace had felt was a closed-off twofer. 

Despite the agony, despite the wandering, hours at airports came and when the desert worn body had reached out in desperation and gripped her, she had felt as if she were being pulled home. Because Frankie was home, and the year of Santa Fe had made Grace understand the impact of her in her life. 

A visit turned into a reunion, bittersweet to one and life-giving to the other. With life more empty, Grace had tried to stuff it with activities and people and when it came down to it, nothing felt as good as the old life had been. The one with the two of them doing crazy shit.

Like the clouds parting on a rainy day or the magic of cake pops, Frankie had come back. There was something about hearing her choose their life together in LaJolla as opposed to the quiet predictability of Jacob and Santa Fe. And while Grace hadn’t been able to outright express her elation, she had felt it in every fiber of her bones. 

_~“So patient and loving-unflappable”~_

You don’t ever expect the kindness you receive. That’s the thing about it-it comes from a genuine place where hearts are soft and love can thrive. 

Grace has been a lot of different people in her life: beautiful trophy wife, naive and lost mother, business mogul, broken partner, mean and belligerent alcoholic. She’d never really had the chance to be someone’s best friend though, is pretty sure that no one had ever really wanted her for that. But she became that to Frankie. 

So much so that Frankie had given up her freedom for Grace. She’d seen her on a busted knee and broken spirits and followed her to the worst possible place Grace had ever imagined existing. You’d think after you sacrifice yourself to a retirement home to bolster someone else’s emotions about it, you’d be more grateful to have them in your life. But Grace hadn’t done that, even after the nightmare of Walden Villas. 

Frankie had never gone in there with Grace’s attitude of futility. She had tried to integrate and immerse while Grace had shrunk and hidden. 

Each evening, she’d come from the dining hall with a contraband plate covered in plastic wrap, sat it without a word on the small table, and retreated to her room allowing Grace the solitude to eat her pilfered meal alone. She would find more packing tape and lay it on top of the boxes Grace was working on for Vybrant or steer Invisalign lady away with a bonkers story so that vibrators could continue to be shipped even though they had received a verbal cease and desist. 

It was Frankie’s love language and Grace should have noticed sooner and should have talked about it, but after she’d felt so good about their life in the third year, saying she valued Frankie and her nearness seemed too fragile to voice. 

So instead, Grace let Frankie hold her arm when they walked around the premise in case Grace’s knee might feel tender or she would use another room for painting because splotches could really get anywhere in their confined quarters, or she would reach for Grace’s hand and hold it tight when they stared out across the man-made pond that ran through the facility from their patio chairs.

When rarely any part of life then had felt like a victory, much less living, Frankie had been the steady constant. Frankie had tackled each day with the same force and vigor she had before everything had fallen apart, literally and figuratively. 

She was patient. She was kind. Frankie trusted, hoped, and persevered-never ever failing. And as something famous once said: that is the true definition of love. 

_~“I never believed I was deserving of love”~_

The first time she really acknowledged it to herself, even though she played it off, was sitting on the log at the damn ashram. Grace supposed she had known it for longer, but having a very real looking apparition tell you the best part of you is someone else, one tends to notice. 

Grace couldn’t backtrack even five years and arrive at the conclusion Babe had-that she had been in love with Frankie the whole time. That maybe Frankie was too. And it scared her shitless. 

If Babe could see it, and her subconscious was shouting it, how close was Frankie to knowing the truth? Would there be more offers of scheduled kisses, more suggestions of showing mine and yours? It’s a life Grace could never imagine, one she had pushed away a lot inside of her mind so that she couldn’t.

Robert had made a confirmation: Grace was a tough person to be with, much less devote time to in a way that mattered.

It felt like deja vu when she’d fucked off and came back from the Maldives. She and Frankie had launched themselves into a heated exchange of words. 

The house was no longer covered in donuts and Mountain Dew, but cakeyata ingredients and other chaos as wedding preparations happened all around. It all should have been foreshadowing, a signal of what was to come. Of the control Grace couldn’t let go of and of the mistakes she would make. 

Instead of reconnecting with Frankie, telling her that her declarations when she was high didn’t matter, that a video that spoke of fictional events between them that was posted for millions to see wasn’t a big deal, that they could go back to the way it had always been, she hadn’t. She had meant to reset them after her mini-sabbatical so they could move forward but it all got so much worse. 

The thing about cracked things is that if you keep using them like they’re fine, they will eventually cave under the pressure. And while she hadn’t wanted to admit it, the fight in the kitchen felt like the two of them weren’t just cracked but broken beyond repair. And oh, how it had ached.

It’s why she ended up on the beach alone, thinking about where she fit into the puzzle of life, of where she really had a place to belong and with whom. It hadn’t been with Robert or Guy or Phil. It wasn’t with Frankie anymore either and that was almost unbearable. 

Nick had appeared then, always able to sniff out blood in the water and circle. It hadn’t been so easy to see then though. Then, he had seemed comforting and warm and exactly what Grace had needed to get her mind off of being misaligned deep inside from Frankie. 

Grace just wanted to stop the acuteness of the pain in her chest some way, almost any way, and the longer she held Nick’s arm as they walked down the beach, the more she internalized what he said as actual truth: he loved her and wanted to get married. Would it be the last time she ever heard those words in her life? If Frankie had been able to tell her she was a little too much, wouldn’t Nick do the same eventually too? 

It was an onslaught in her mind. Even though the “yes” had felt dry in her throat, she’d said it anyway. If Frankie couldn’t love every annoying part of Grace, if she didn’t want her near, maybe Nick would and did. Feeling like she had missed it for the entirety of her existence, this man before her had offered her something she hadn’t thought herself capable of having. And even if it was the wrong person, it was better than not at all.

So Grace became a wife again, a separate piece from Frankie. When she stood in front of the Korean Elvis and said her vows, she tried not to let her internal voice drown out her actual one. The one that said _you’re saying them to the wrong person._

It was a life she was going to have to learn to live. 

_~“Showed me every single day that I am”~_

Grace tried really hard to become herself in a life consisting of Nick. Wit and charm and a larger than normal life had roped her around the ankles and pulled her in. She had turned initial mild interest into an imagined life together. 

Somewhere amongst careening out of control and the piling up wreckage of her and Frankie, Nick filled some of the void left by the chaotic emotions that had risen and broken within her heart toward the one person she was never meant to even like. For all of a few mere hours. 

And then Grace was back on the beach, back with Frankie and spilling out her heart and becoming misty-eyed. She was having to explain what real deal married meant, that it wasn’t some cruel joke even if it had been brash and impulsive. That their dynamic, loathe as she were to admit it, was irrevocably changed. 

But a funny thing happened as she tried to be a good wife. The harder she worked to be dutiful and vibrant and sexual, she realized that it was work. It wasn’t with ease or minimal effort. It was desperately trying every second to move and be and just ending up terrible at it.

From day one, it was a three way. Grace would try to give to Nick while also remembering Frankie and somehow shoving herself deeper under. In fact, she pushed so hard that she completely disappeared with Nick. It was only when he was gone could she let go and let someone save her. 

Frankie designed a whole new contraption to help Grace. She dropped everything to come to the aid of the damsel in distress. She let her brain be inundated with ideas all in Grace’s favor. Every day, without fail, Frankie had remained a constant. 

Unbeknownst to her, Grace had done the same. 

She’d offered the things she thought beyond herself, things like conflict resolution shirts and baths. Actually begging Frankie to attend her first outing as Mrs. Skolka. Almost begging that Frankie be allowed to tag behind her and Nick on a romantic Hawaiian vacation. Not balking at words like “lover” and “soulmate.”

And if life is supposed to be about loving and being loved, about giving yourself and getting some back, there was really only one person who fit that two-way street. Nick was not it. 

So year six went a little bit differently than Grace expected, containing a marriage, a divorce, and a whole lot of shit in between. While their toilet sank, she and Frankie’s relationship seemed to rise up above everything. 

It became more important than almost every other thing and it seemed like everyone in her life knew it, told her so, and didn’t try to change it. So, Grace stopped trying too and maybe the universe heard her whisper. Hell, maybe she even screamed it. In any event, Nick wound up in jail and she couldn’t find it within herself to get too upset. 

Frankie had grabbed her hand, they had their slice of beach and 50k in couch money turning into freezer money, and they had another business to keep them going. Grace had the life back that she knew she had wanted but didn’t know how to ask for.

The old saying goes, _sometimes you don’t get what you want, you get what you need._ Grace was glad that for her, there was barely a line between the two.

_~“I love you, I love you, I love you”~_

When it boils down to it, what she’s really been doing is writing a six year love letter to Frankie. Through the beautiful highs and heartbreaking lows, she’s made the same choice time and time again. 

And really, so has Frankie. It’s inevitable really, the shared dynamics of them and the connected flesh. There have been so many variations of Frankie inside of her heart that this new stage isn’t a conundrum or unexpected. It’s just taken a little longer to get to than it probably should have. 

Normally, Grace would have preferred to not start things when Robert and Sol still occupied the beach house as well, but it seemed oddly fitting considering what the two of them did for a span of twenty years. So Grace let it happen right under their noses, so to speak, and didn’t feel an ounce of guilt at all. 

Frankie hadn’t seemed to mind either as they’d spent too long talking into the night, holed up in Frankie’s studio with soft music and hard-hitting weed. But then that wore off and what was left was the two of them together like they hadn’t had in months, nowhere to go and no one to pull them apart. 

When she was absolutely sure they were both sober, she’d been the one to lean in and kiss Frankie first, devoid of drink and drug. Her heart had felt infinitely full, like a cup with liquid spilling over the edge because of how to the brim it was. 

Grace had kissed a woman in her life, sure, but it paled in comparison to kissing Frankie. And really, every other person she had ever done it with too. The way they had just fit together in that dumb, cliched way everyone always talked about and Grace scoffed at. How the flesh of her lips had been pliant with Grace’s teeth. 

They had pulled apart all breath and sighs and Grace had to tell herself that the world didn’t want her to rush through it all at once. That even though her life clock might be low on its battery, she still had time to do Frankie right. After all, she had waited for her for what seemed like her entire life.

She’d been preparing for the arrival of Frankie in her heart, bit by bit. While eighty years might be a long time to get something correct, no one had ever accused Grace of lacking meticulousness and striving for perfection. So maybe it had taken every single wrong soul to reach Frankie who was _the one_. Maybe even with a capital ‘o.’

“I love you,” she said when there was no other sound except the two of them: no ocean or music or dog yapping somewhere in the recesses of a house. It was quiet and Grace had spoken it with her whole self, felt it down to her core. 

Even though Frankie had said it a hundred times before in a hundred different ways, she had answered back, the first time ever in response to Grace speaking it first. So many firsts. 

Later, but not much, she had spoken it against Frankie’s skin, another cliche. It had been punctuation, not a period but a comma. A promise of more to come, of added detail. “I love you,” she had said again and floated down from the rungs of the ladder she had climbed to the top of because of Frankie’s fingers coaxing her into undone. 

They’d held hands, pulse points touching and beating wildly during the comedown. The air was cool and their skin with sheen was headed to becoming gooseflesh. Frankie had rolled to create a cover, pulled the sheet over their bodies to hide them from the outside. The once dome of the material fell and became a shroud, the two of them buried underneath. 

Grace had laughed a throaty chortle, had wrapped her arms around Frankie’s back and let her hands roam unceasingly. Frankie took to running the top of her nose along Grace’s, pulling the air from her in slow and calculated kisses, finding a home for her hand between Grace’s legs. 

“Is this how you imagined it,” Frankie whispered then. “Life?”

“Something like it,” Grace had smiled. 

Because it was true. While she may have not known the trajectory as she went along, Grace found the place she landed was precisely what she had wanted. To squander that would be senseless. And with Frankie connected to her in all of the ways, every nerve ending was alive. 

After a lifetime of searching, of less than and not enough, finally, _finally_ , it felt good to have. Grace wove her fingers through Frankie’s hair then, said the phrase that had been destined for Frankie her entire life.


End file.
